GNOME Shell 3.25.91 lands in Artful, final release will ship with 3.26

As a part of migration to GNOME Shell 3.26 in Ubuntu 17.10 Artful, Ubuntu team has packed GNOME 3.25.91 in update repositories. This will give way to 3.26 once the upstream release is available.

Ubuntu 17.10 Artful will be the first release of Ubuntu featuring GNOME shell as default session. In order to provide a Unity like experience, Ubuntu team is customizing GNOME shell a little bit. This customization includes dash to dock extension for GNOME shell, which was shipped in earlier beta release. Now, Ubuntu is planning to have notification badge for dock. It is already implemented and committed to upstream repository. It will be available in Ubuntu Artful once the review process is completed.

Updated control center in Ubuntu Artful

Other ongoing activities in Ubuntu Artful development includes:

The KStatusNotifier extension is packed in repositories to provide support for indicators. This
will provide support for apps which use libappindicators which was
removed from GNOME 3.26.

Test plan has been revised to catch bugs and regression issues for fresh installation of default session

People with non-hybrid NVIDIA graphics cards can not normally use the
Wayland session unless they are adventurous and enable KMS. If that is
done, however, X11 sessions then break. This week we have incorporated a
change into GDM (also proposed upstream) to hide the X11 sessions in
this scenario so that we make the system a bit more usable even for
people who like to tweak.

Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) now shows the correct theme in ‘install
only’ mode, as well as in the live session. Previously it was using
GNOME’s default theme “Adwaita”.

Performance issue while playing videos on totem has been fixed. It reduces almost 50% of CPU usage

Mobile broadband provider info has been updated from Debian and is now in sync with Debian Sid.

Initial support for authenticating using PolicyKit has landed in snapd master

We landed PCLm print output support. With this all known driverless
printing standards are supported, making most modern printers work under
Linux.

For more detailed information about Ubuntu Desktop development activities, see weekly news letter published in Ubuntu Insights.